Sunday, October 23, 2016

A hall of mirrors

by digby

This quote from a former Wikileaks employee from a couple of years back struck me. He quit the organization over ethical concerns and they fought him back. He writes:

Seeing yourself portrayed by WikiLeaks is like walking through a circus hall of mirrors: there’s just enough resemblance for you to recognize yourself, but you’re seriously distorted—and usually in a way that makes you look grotesque.

I have no idea what's going on with them at the moment, but they are openly taking a partisan position in the election on behalf of Donald Trump even though Trump is an authoritarian opposed to everything they used to stand for. No one who works for Trump in the name of civil liberties can be trusted.

I will treat them the same way I treat Breitbart and the Daily Caller going forward: as a propaganda outfit. I don't know on whose behalf they are propagandizing but their support for Trump makes it clear that it's not an entity that shares my values.

*And for the record, I do not conflate Edward Snowden with Wikileaks. Snowden is a whistleblower not a partisan. I've seen no evidence that he's interested in playing the kind of games Wikileaks is playing. I doubt he's much enamored of either candidate since Trump is a monster and Clinton is an establishment politician who is unlikely to be any more sympathetic to his situation than President Obama. One might hope that the media's obsession with her correspondence and the hacking of her campaign emails would open up her perceptions a bit on the necessity to protect privacy from both hackers and the government but it will be surprising. Government officials are almost unanimously oriented toward protecting the intelligence communities' prerogatives.